“For Religion and for Patria”: Bishop Giovanni Battista Scalabrini and Italian Emigrant Nation-Building

The origins of the Scalabrinians, a Catholic missionary order, in late nineteenth-century Italy reveal how international migration created a space for Catholic collaboration with the secular Italian state on a nation-building project during a period of bitter separation. The Kingdom of Italy was created in 1861, and its army seized Rome from the Pope in 1870.  The loss of papal territory and the anticlerical beliefs of many Italian leaders created a rift between the new state and the Catholic Church, and they would not formally reconcile until 1929.  However, massive Italian emigration in the late nineteenth-century concerned both.  Emigrants faced poverty and exploitation abroad, and both the Church and Italian state feared losing their influence over the millions who emigrated.  This paper will examine the intervention of the Italian Bishop Giovanni Battista Scalabrini into the Church-state debate as he successfully obtained support from both entities for his religious order's missionary work among Italian emigrants.  In 1887, he founded the Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo (known today as the Scalabrinians) to provide religious and charitable assistance to Italians in the Americas.  The order actively promoted emigrants' Italian culture and heritage abroad as a means of tying them to Italy and thus the Catholic Church.  Scalabrini believed being a true Italian included being a practicing Catholic; he was an Italian patriot but above all loyal to the Church.  He strategically used his connections in the Italian state and Church hierarchy to obtain support and funds for his missionaries' work. Scalabrini's intervention in the debate demonstrates that, even at the height of nineteenth-century nationalist clashes with Catholic power, Catholics could comfortably engage in nation-building activities alongside the Italian state when they sought the same results, even though for very different purposes.